NBP committed to providing financial services to all: Adil

RECORDER REPORT

KARACHI: National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) is committed to provide financial services to all segment of the society, particularly the most disadvantaged and left over population, said Adnan Adil Hussain, Senior Vice President & Head Consumer & Retail Banking Division, NBP.

Addressing a press conference here on Monday, he said that despite numerous challenges, the NBP’s performance stood out during the last 5 years as its products and strategies were primarily based around national priorities and common man.

On the occasion, Ibne-Hassan, Divisional Head Corporate Communications, Farooq Hassan SVP/ Divisional Head Business Development, Zubair Mirza Wing Head Collections, Tariq Hassan Wing Head Commercial banking, Ahmer Liaqat Head of Advance Salary Wing and  Sohail Arbab Head of Saiban Home finance wing were also present.

Adnan informed that NBP was completely online banks and already become the first ever bank of the country to cross the ‘One Trillion Rupee’ bench mark with more than 24000 employees and l290 branch network across Pakistan. NBP has also 23 overseas branches and representative offices in four countries and unique footprint in South Asia, Central Asia and Middle East, he added. “With a large network of branches across the country, NBP is willing to provide essential financial services to the most disadvantaged and left over strata of population,” he added.

He said that there were several areas where NBP was the only financial institution to provide financial services to the general public. “Out of 3 million pensioners, NBP caters more than 2.1 million through its 1,290 plus branches network,” he added.

“NBP has approximately 1.8 million salary accounts of government employees, employees of public sector institutions, provincial governments and local bodies etc and timely disbursement of these salaries every month is no easy task,” Adnan mentioned.

Talking about the consumer financing, he said that NBP’s consumer finance initiatives were also specially for the deprived and disadvantaged sections of society, which really need financing.

Adnan cited example of NBP Advance Salary, which is the single largest personal loan product in the industry with a market share of nearly 52 percent. He said the scheme was launched in 2003, ‘Advance Salary’ loans were targeted towards public sector employees who were already NBP’s account holders.

“Recently, in order to further facilitate the government employees of the country, NBP has increased the maximum financing limit upto One Million.  Permanent employees of Government, Semi-Government, Autonomous bodies, corporations employees now can fulfill their financial needs by just entering their respective NBP branches where they are maintaining their salary accounts and they can get their required amount on easy monthly installments,” he mentioned.

“Advance Salary product is successful product of the banks and so far NBP has disbursed more than Rs 210 billion under this scheme and more than 1.5 million government employees have benefited from the scheme. Despite these huge volumes, the infection is only 2 percent as against 15 percent of market and no other private commercial bank comes even close to these numbers,” divisional head consumer banking said.

Briefing about the NBP’s scheme Cash in Gold, he said that, it’s a unique and well thought out product and has very silently become a flagship for NBP consumer.

“Agriculture is yet another area where NBP leads its counterparts by a huge margin and outreaches approximately over 250,000 farmers in the every corner of the country to provide them financing for their crops and other related requirements,” Adnan said. He informed that during the last year some Rs 45 billion were disburse on account of agricultural credit. To a question, he said that in 2011, Saibaan, house loan scheme, was temporarily halted. However, he added, now the NBP’s consumer team is working on a strategy for restarting the product.